Random missing non-Latin fonts in Firefox on OS X?

December 18, 2006 1:18 PM

How can I get certain non-Latin fonts to show up as display options in Firefox on a Mac?

I'm using Firefox 1.5.0.8 on OS X (10.4.8 Tiger) on a MacBook I bought this October, and there are a bunch of fonts that do not appear on the drop-down lists of fonts in the Preferences window. All but three of these fonts appear among Safari's font choices. The entire list of missing fonts (that appear in FontExplorer X but not in Firefox > Preferences > Content > Fonts & Colors > Advanced) is:

• .Aqua Kana*
• .Keyboard*
• Al Bayan
• Baghdad
• Corsiva Hebrew
• DecoType Naskh
• Devanagari MT
• Gujarati MT
• Gurmukhi MT
• KufiStandardGK
• LastResort*
• Mshtakan
• Nadeem
• New Peninim MT
• Raanana
• Sathu

That list is pretty much all non-Latin (Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic) fonts, but I'm not sure why these fonts, and not others, disappear. I'm especially concerned about Devanagari MT, since my inability to read it in Firefox is what started this whole thing. I don't really want to have to switch to another browser (like Safari) to read it, and I'm not sure why these fonts and not others are missing from the list. I've even tried manually setting the default Devanagari font to Devanagari MT in about:config, with no success. This [mirror] might be the answer as far as the cause, but I'm really looking for a solution to the problem. I haven't found an answer on bugzilla.mozilla.org either, but from what I've read there and elsewhere, it seems at least possible for some users to get Devanagari script to display using Firefox in OS X. What can I do?

*Fonts that don't appear in Safari's preferences, either.

posted by skoosh to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Does editing Preferences > Advanced > General > Edit Languages help?
posted by ardgedee at 4:55 PM on December 18, 2006

Sadly, no. For some odd reason, Hindi and Devanagari don't appear as language options in that preference pane, so I chose Gujarati and made it first on the list. There was no change at all (using Gujarati language and its counterpart on gu.wikipedia.org as test cases). Still a bunch of question marks where something legible ought to be.

The ironic part is that the article name in the Gujarati Wikipedia shows up in Gujarati script in both the title bar and the list of recently visited pages in the Go menu. But not in the history sidebar or anywhere else.
posted by skoosh at 8:43 PM on December 19, 2006